Choire Sicha Happily Unaware of TheAwl.com’s Traffic

Earlier this week, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk launched TheAwl.com to mostly positive acclaim. Has the press’ lovefest led to strong traffic?

Sicha, for one, has no idea. “You know, I have actually *never looked* at our traffic,” he emailed FishbowlNY.com this morning. “I leave that in David Cho’s capable hands; he’s our business guy, and that stuff is his problem. I am just trying to have a good time, and that itself is our stated goal.”

Given the site’s other stated goal of avoiding linkbait, we suspect traffic isn’t the most important metric but we asked Cho for his thoughts anyway:

Traffic may not be the most important metric, but it’s obviously one of the few base statistics that we have to gauge how people are responding to the site other than friends wishing us well and random strangers who that happen to email the notes@theawl line. That being said, two days of traffic is hardly a sample size from which we can draw any real judgments. Personally, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the numbers — especially the repeat traffic we’ve seen — through the first couple of days, but, again, it’s nothing we can hang our hat on or extrapolate from yet.

He added that the goals of the site are “to secure funding and then eventually create a lean and cash positive business,” and that “none of us want to make a site that we’re not proud of, so it’s all about figuring out a way to effectively monetize the audience that they’re building.”